Literary / Arts
Well-wrought Book Explores Relationship of Poet to Mystic
Volume 29 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 14, 2015
Into The Mystic – My Years with Olga by Susan McCaslin. INANNA Publications & Education Inc., Toronto, ON. Memoir Series. www.inanna.ca.
Into The Mystic – My Years with Olga by Susan McCaslin. INANNA Publications & Education Inc., Toronto, ON. Memoir Series. www.inanna.ca.
Celebrated Christian poet Susan McCaslin explores her personal relationship with a mystical recluse who was a seminal influence in her life in her new book Into the Mystic – My Years With Olga.
An American by birth, McCaslin was studying at Simon Fraser University in 1969 when a friend invited her to meet Olga Park, an English emigre formed in the British psychical research school of mysticism. Someone familiar with the experience of Second Sight, table turning, ‘the other side’ and the gentle Christian occult ritual practices.
It was an era when western culture was revisiting mysticism in many forms and for Susan, Olga was one vital pathway to that door which to this day infuses the prizewinning poetry of Ms. McCaslin.
This is a memoir of self-examination by a sensitive writer as well as an introduction to Olga, a woman who represented an individuated path unique to her era. Her life breached the gap between 19th century mysticism and the metaphysical spiritualities that emerged during the 1960s which have shaped the sensibilities of younger generations since.
This is actually a book by a mystic about a mystic. The very term mystic shifts in its interpretation with every generation. Today’s mystics are of the cosmological seeker variety (see related stories "The Cosmic Priest Who Couldn't Quit" and "Teilhard de Chardin: Adoration of Suicide"). When Susan met Olga in the 1960s, a similar transformation had taken place as the Age of Aquarius met the 19th century seance variety of mystic. Those who had acquaintance with the other side, second sight and other paranormal psychological phenomenon.
In the Christian tradition there is a spectrum of major kinds of mystics, the dark soul of unknowing of Saint John of the Cross to the positivist Julian of Norwich sort. William James documented the varieties of religious experience in his famous study of that title. The sick souls met the twice born between his covers. Susan McCaslin is well aware of this range.
I like the way this book is put together, very cleverly in small digestible portions. On that point, and maybe it is my journalistic bias but I was hoping for a few juicy tidbits in the opening chapter that would entice you with telling or at least revealing anecdotes that would be fleshed out more fully later in the book.
But as I say it is sensational journalism speaking perhaps. It is all there as you go through. I can remember that era in the late 1960s when everything seemed broken wide open and just waiting for our new generation to seize and explore. Older mystical figures like Olga had a great appeal because we badly needed that, alienated as we were from the materialist values and ways of our parents’ generation.
This book satisfies that looking back in its comprehensive perspective of mysticism. Susan McCaslin, in characteristic scholarly fashion, presents her experience of Olga in the context of her lifelong familiarity of the mystical tradition including her own Christian perspective.
Susan McCaslin is both a disciplined and a gifted writer, a poet who has been awarded and has rewarded the reader with this fine work. Her book Demeter goes Skydiving won the Alberta Book Publisher Award in 2012 and was also shortlisted for the BC Book Prize in the same year. Anyone interested in the mystical experience today, rendered by the sensibility of a fine poet would do well to make the acquaintance of this book.